Unlocking Happiness at Work with Jennifer Moss

0:00 So you talked really nicely behind people's bags. And they did this research and found that in these organizations where they practiced positive gossip, that onboarding was exponentially increased in the time people felt comfortable in their roles, and a big reason for that was this great increase in innovation and psychological psychological safety was people believed, which you know, perception is reality. People perceived that people were saying nice things about them behind their bag.

0:45 Welcome back to Crappy Tom Happy today. I'm very excited to be heading into the studio to have an in person interview with Jennifer Moss Jen hailes from Canada. I'm very fortunate that she's visiting London and has made the time to see me. Jen is a workplace well being strategist. She is passionate about helping organizations to cultivate thriving workplaces. She explores the data to work out what makes people happy at work and why that matters not just for the individuals, but for the organization as well. Jen's got some pretty impressive credentials. I feel like I should just run through a few of them for you. She consults with Fortune five hundred companies around the world about their organizational culture. She's featured in. Media outlets around the world, rights for the Harvard Business Review.

1:27 She runs around doing keynotes around the world. I mean, everybody wants her insights into how to cultivate thriving workplaces. Now. Jen's written several books, and ten years ago she wrote one called Unlocking Happiness at Work. As we all know, a lot has changed in the last ten years. We've had the pandemic, we've moved to this whole remote hybrid working situation, We've had the introduction of AI. I mean, the shifts have been profound. So therefore, on the tenth anniversary of the release of that book, Jen has fully revised and updated it. So I was fortunate enough to receive a copy of that book. Absolutely loved it, of course, because it is all of the stuff that I am also really passionate about. While this is the tenth anniversary of Unlocking Happiness at Work. In the meantime, she also wrote The Burnout Epidemic in twenty twenty one, and just this year she wrote a book called Why Are We Here?

2:17 So if these are topics that are of interest to you, highly recommend that you go and check them. Out. I'll put the links in the show notes, but for now, let's go talk to Jen about what makes people happy at work. Jennifer, Welcome to the Crappy to Happy podcast and welcome to London. I'm so happy to be here, not just because it's London, but it's so nice to sit and I have a feace to face conversation with you. This is great in person. Yeah, that has been my focus this year, and it's so interesting that you and I are going to talk about happiness at work. Because, as somebody who's been who works for myself and works from home, and I've been doing this podcast from home since Covid, I this year have just said no more. I'm just desperate to get into the room with people. So I'm so interested to have a conversation with you about you know, who else is feeling like this and what's going on in terms of happiness at work.

3:07 I love that. And you know, when just before we started talking, I was saying how just sick and tired I am of zoom calls and how exhausted I get by them, and how fueled I get. When I'm actually in a room with people, It's like a completely different sense of connection and energy in the space, and I think a lot of people are missing that too. Yeah, So, when it comes to happiness at work, such an important topic because obviously work is such a huge part of our life. We spend so many hours at work. It's such a part of our identity. Even so, straight off the bat, while there's going to be differences for different individuals and different demographics, what is universally true, like what are the fundamentals that contribute to people being happier at work generally?

3:58 So, you know, I started Unlucky Happiness at Work ten years ago, and you know, it was to really understand psychological fitness. There was a lot there wasn't a lot that people were talking about really at that point around happiness at work. There was some I mean Sean Aker and some others that were just really prolific there, but the idea of telling a CFO that they should invest in happiness strategy was like just people were rolling their eyes at us. And I mean, despite all the great data that says this is good for business outcomes. And you know, through that process and then writing the burnout Epidemic, which was essentially you know, I became the unhappiness Expert after being the happiness expert and then writing why are we here, which is another kind of I think similar to this book. It's kind of like a what can we do with all this information? The how? But what I think is fundamental is understanding that for people to really have high levels of happy and well being at work, we need to make sure that we have the hygiene right.

5:04 We have. The stuff that people should not even know is happening behind the scenes, that they're just being paid fairly, that you know, that they're psychologically safe, that they have their needs being met, that they're not being discriminated against, you know that we have these basic fundamental needs sort of like the maslocks with kind of looking at it, not as a pyramid. We know that now, but just in what are these fundamental needs? And if we've got that going, if we have that right in an organization, then people have the opportunity to invest in self care, to you know, engage with their community, to feel like that they matter at work, to be optimized. And I think that that is the thing that I've really learned in the last year ten years since I started this book to now is that it isn't just about those downstream tactics to make people happy, like more yoga and you know, and right and kind of these like band aid solutions. That it really is this foundational piece and then we build on that.

6:12 Yeah. Really interesting. So when you say downstream, that's you know, you're talking about the individual taking responsibility for being happier that whole choose happiness, which was a title of a chapter in a book that. I wrote at one point too. But in actual fact, there are all of these environmental factors. There's the culture and the support systems around people that are a huge part of whether or not they're going to feel comfortable and safe enough to then be able to thrive. You nailed it. I mean I did write whose Happiness? That was a theme. You know, it was always I think even then, I had the T shirt good Vibes Only Happiness is a journey, and you know, all of them names, all the memes that became so popular, which also created toxic positivity and people felt like that they couldn't say I'm not okay.

7:06 And so in the book you would have seen I sort of apologize for whatever part I played in that, because at the time it did make sense. It was about psychological fitness, and at the time it was also self care. I mean that was even a brand new topic. Yeah, fifteen years ago, twelve years ago when we started the company and then wrote the book. So there's been an evolution in that thinking to understand that we can't choose happiness all the time, and that's a privilege and a lot of you know, in a lot of places, choosing happiness means that you have all of those other foundational stuff, even just social support that you have. You know, you have the ability to buy food and pay rent and you know those simple things that can really be devastating to our happiness and make it very difficult to choose it. So, you know, in this new you know, conversation that we're having, it really is about how do we think about happiness in a much more nuanced and complex way. Maybe it shouldn't even be called happiness, you know, like, you know, what does that look like? I still like the words, So I'm going to keep it.

8:15 I do too, and everybody get everybody gets it right, I just go Look, it's just everybody understands what you mean as soon as you say happy. So I'm going to keep using it. Whether you like it or not, that's theage. Yes, we get what that means. Yes, And yeah, there's lots of people that are saying we have to change I don't think we have to change the word. I think we need to give people a better understanding of what a definition. Yeah. Now, when you were talking and you were talking about psychological safety and you know, getting paid well and all of those fundamentals, it occurred to me that what you're talking about is not happiness at work. You're talking about happiness generally like that we have. A we are a whole person.

8:57 Yes, And essentially what you're saying is the stuff that's going to make because support our well being broadly is the same stuff that's going to support us at work that is necessary in the workplace. And are you saying that we or organizations haven't been getting this right? No, I mean, and it's gotten worse. And I've found in the pandemic there was this moment And unfortunately, in this may sound cynical from a person that you know tries to talk positively and optimistically, but I think you have to have a healthy skepticism. But I do feel like that in the pandemic because it was a bottom line issue because we were losing so many people and there was so much mobility, and there was this great resignation and we saw a lot of organizations say, okay, well we got to do what we have to do to keep these people retained. And it worked, you know, the investment in well being, the investment in diversity and equity and inclusion, this ability to you support autonomy all of a sudden when we you know, didn't have agency before it was flexibility. There was so many things we were doing right when it comes to happiness at work.

10:10 And then as soon as there was less mobility and as soon as it was more in you know, employers or organizations their control, they started to claw back. And so we're hearing things like the Great Betrayal because it was an investment in people's happiness and well being and that was working. But you realize that for organizations, if it's not a bottom line issue, it gets it gets tossed. Yeah, and that's really unfortunate. It was an unfortunate realization that we saw that pendulum swing and then now it's slung back. Yeah. I really wanted to talk to you about that that during the pandemic have so many questions about that.

10:54 So first up, it occurs. To me that during the pandemic and the shift to everybody having to be at home and doing all of the zoom calls and being taking the calls in their lounge room, it seemed to have the effect of really humanizing people. Whatever role you had in the organization, from the CEO down to whoever the lowest level admin assistant. You know, when people were all having to dial in and their kids are in the background or their pets in the room, it seemed to have this effect of kind of leveling and humanizing people. Have you seen that kind of continue in terms of that just people being more comfortable to just kind of be themselves in show up for themselves, or be more honest about what's going on at home. Has it helped to shift our perspective or our expectations of people in a way.

11:44 I do think that there has been more conversation even just about the terms. I mean, we've normalized the term burnout and that has become ubiquitous. And you know, I was writing The Burnout Epidemic before the pandemic and then it hit. Wow, had to rewrite a lot of it and so it was fortunately for the book, it was you know, it was in the same kind of realm as unprecedented and you're on mute. You know, burnout became just as much of an overused term. And so in a way, when we do that, when we just kind of pound people with that term, there's more conversations about it, and that is good. There's more measurement that I'm seeing in organizations around stress so that we can improve well being.

12:32 There's an understanding that it does work. I mean, there's they saw it, they saw it work, and it is something that there's way more investment in it than there was before. But I do think that there is still so much stigma. There's what we found in our research is that of the people that were extremely or highly burned out, sixty seven percent of them could not talk about their mental health at work. Oh really, it correlates, and this idea of not being able to actually talk about it is still very ever present and we're still seeing you know, that Mercer Trends report just came out that eighty one percent of the global workforce is still at risk of burnout. So really, so we haven't done much about it, but we are having more conversations about it.

13:21 I think that a lot of leaders just have a really hard time understanding how to operationalize a happiness strategy, and so instead we get like, okay, let's just you know, put money to things that aren't working, and unfortunately that's leading to a lot of people still feeling uncared for. Yeah. So so talking about the burnout and just going back to the remote you know, the pandemic and the impact that that has had and the shift in the way that we work. You know, I work for myself and I went from home, so I'm not really in that space. But from what I observe, the ider remote working gives people flexibility. They don't have to commute and they can.

14:05 It gives them a better life balance. On the downside, they're not necessarily getting the regular social interaction and the incidental kind of conversations. So are you saying that if the net sum of all of that is that people are actually more stressed, like, it hasn't actually been a positive change that they have. This hybrid system is pretty widely accepted now and that people can you know, not have to be in the office. I think what we're seeing is the data is that hybrid has become sort of a normal status. We're finding even if we just look at this purely capitalists you know analysis. This is research out of Stanford from Nick Bloom, and he looks at kind of what is the ideal situation for this hybrid remote conversation fully in the office, and what he's found from the data is that hybrid is the most ideal. That fully remote is not, you know, the best from a financial standpoint. If he's an economist, so he's looking at it from that standpoint. Fully in person is actually not that, you know, that's it's not the best way from a purely revenue generating growth competitiveness standpoint.

15:25 And his research, along with other research, looked at the sort of optimal kind of I guess model, and it's two days in the office, three days out of the office, and two days in the office should be more about moments that matter. It should be collaborative, it should be work that is focused on team building. It's supposed to be onboarding, and you utilize the time in the office to really be with one another another, have fun even just you know, like have lunch together and do that kind of work. And so it's rethinking what the office looks like. This is ideal, and they have found that this kind of model three days out, two days in increases productivity by twelve percent. It also retains your highest performers.

16:14 It also is inclusive of women. There's just all these benefits to it. And so I think the real problem is that we're sending people back in the office and just replicating what it would be like from home. Right you're just you know, on zoom all day and then but you're in the office with the community. It's just terrible. So that's what we're getting wrong. And probably not even having your own disk to see that, because right, you know, I have sold half of the building. It really is so weird that we wouldn't think that you have the biggest disruption. I think that the pandemic was the biggest workforce disruption, even more than AI, even more than email, even more than.

16:55 The first office. Like, this is a massive disruption. This is not the future of work. This is the multiverse of work. Where Like we jumped a timeline, and so the idea that we shouldn't kind of configure a new strategy, that we should just kind of pull in the old way of working. It just feels so it just really feels naive to me. And what people are doing is that what organizations are basically doing, they're not really on board with this optimal way. We're seeing more with hybrid that it is three days, and then there's a desire to kind of inch up to four days, but you're still considered hybrid because you're four days. A lot of the financial institutions we're seeing now trying to get everyone back. You see Amazon pulling everyone back to five days, and all the data says that it actually is reducing productivity and you lose people, you lose your best people, unfortunately, so then they go to places that offer flexibility, and then it decreases morale.

18:00 And the thing is if you don't actually use those two days, if you're in the optimal situation where you're still replicating the home experience, what they're finding is people are less social because they're so time starved. And when you're feeling this level of time starvation, the last thing you want to do is meet for lunch, because that means now you have to finish your work and your pajamas at eleven o'clock at night, or you know, you don't want to engage in this after work because you know, you haven't even been able to read either, go pee during the day because you're in so many meetings that I think is really leading to this gap in our relationships, which is foundational to happiness. We don't have time for each other. We don't have anyone in leadership saying I'm going to you know, give you time to do this, and that is creating this real disconnect. There are companies that are doing a good job of it, though, so it's not just it's it's novel, but it is there and I've seen it.

19:03 You just said about the social relationships that are so important, and I was just thinking that again with the remote working, and the one of the objections that I've heard is, you know, the like the lack of trust in people, this idea that if people are at home that they won't be that they won't be working. And not just that that is I mean, you can tell me whether that is incorrect, that they're not working, but the impact of the lack of trust in people's level of satisfaction with work. This is so frustrating to me. The more that we even increase this bus wear monitoring of people and how they work, and looking at key strokes and even people that are coming key strokes, key strokes or video there's really sure that they're sitting at their desk. There's things too.

19:55 It's you know, this whole idea of past keys, and they're now trying to kind of clamp down on people just badging in but then not actually staying, and so now they're monitoring where they are in the building. I mean, it's just there's so many things that I don't understand why we're so afraid that people aren't getting their work done. And the thing is is that's not an individual problem. This is a leadership problem. Have you set the right goals for that person? Why are you measuring hours? Why are you measuring the physical presence of people and not looking at what are the objectives for that person to complete in the day? And who cares how they get there. Do you have a really good relationship with your manager and they have good you know, you have good conversations at the end of the week to make sure that you're meeting those objectives. That should be the way that we empower people, and yet we instead we monitor them and we make them feel like a child. And that is one of the things that I heard from a senior executive and I wish I could remember her name, but of course it's you know, this great female leader her and she says, you know, we hired adults to come into work. Why are we cheat treating them like children.

21:08 It's not like coming to school. You know, we don't need to take attendance and you know, make sure that we have these breaks for lunch and recess. It really is that they are grown ups, a lot of them with you know, great education or really specialized skills, and we're afraid that they're not working. That is, we're just not doing a good job of managing goal setting and goal achievement exactly. I need to ask you then, do you see or does the research bear out a generational difference in the attitudes that people have and actually further to that, like and just in drivers, like what makes people happy at work?

21:49 What are the generational There's a lot of questions in there, but what's the difference gen x gen Z and you. Know that you know, the U curve of happiness in people's lives, right, and that sort of shift, which is really interesting because it used to be young, people were happy, and then you had a dip in your midlife, and then seventy is the happiest you've ever been in your life. I love that you have grand You have grandkids so you can send them home. You aren't working anymore, You're still very active, right, so you've got this great quality of life. So I always share this this slide with people, and I'm like, I'm sorry, exers, you're in the trough of despair. You are like the least happiest. But what is so fascinating, and you see this at work, is we're seeing kind of this all groups feeling frustrated and feeling like they're so different from each other, and yet they all want the same thing. And I keep seeing and I've looked at metastas and cross reference data, and you ask about flexibility, it's like a marginal difference between how much a gram you know, like someone in their sixties, because what we're finding is that people in their sixties right now and their grandparents one in four are primary caregivers.

23:02 So this idea that you know that they wouldn't want graternity benefits. You know, they are talking about these things that which are starting to come into to play because we're wanting to make sure we're holding onto our mature workers. I know this is a big thing in the UK right now, is this, you know, keeping mature workers in the workforce. And there's all these financial incentives that are being thrown at them, but they're actually they come from a generation of saving and they're all saying, I don't really need to work. I've set myself up, I own my home, I've made this plan, and so the financial incentives aren't working. They are saying, They're like, I'm out of here. Why would I want to be in this workforce?

23:47 They say, I don't feel like I belong. This is another really interesting data point where when they surveyed those that were taking early retirement by choice, they ask them, you know, like what would made you say stay? And forty percent of them said that they would have stayed if they had more continuing education, that they were supported in learning the technology that everyone else knows, but they were bypassed in that training and so they are unhappy. But you also see gen zs really feeling disconnected. That's the highest rate of youngism that we've seen in history of actually analyzing agism. There's really harsh attitudes towards Gen zs right now, and millennials and exers are getting leap frogged by their millennial sort of the people that they're leading.

24:39 And what's happening is they're succession planning and they're investing in succession planning, but no one above them, Like we're not seeing boomers actually looking at xers and saying I'm going to try to promote you. So it's they're getting stalled, but millennials are leap frogging them. So I think that there is a lot of generational frustrations and it's unique for every generation. But from a happiness standpoint, they're all feeling like their needs aren't being met. So nobody's happy. Nobody's sadly. When you look at the engagement numbers, I mean it's the lowest it's been in a decade. Active disengagement is the highest it's been in a decade. So the numbers are saying that most people at work are not satisfied, they're not happy at work.

25:25 Getting back to that young ism, that attitude towards young people is, is it that idea that they don't want to work, they just want to go straight to be the CEO, the one of stout On six figures that. That is any of that true? Do they have different expectations? They do? And I think that's important to note because we have to recognize first that every generation, new generation pushes back on the status quo. That's what they do. And you know what, we have modeled a terrible example of work. Yes, everyone's burned out. They look at their parents who hate their jobs. They just recently you know, quit after how lots of people quitting after twenty years, and they're just like, this is terrible. I'm out of here.

26:12 We're seeing the thinnest executive pipeline for women. They're like, I'm bouncing. It's just no one's happy. And so they're they're thinking, like why would I want to do that? First, that's terrible. And then also we raised this generation right away. As soon as they could speak, we were asking them like how they felt about their soother or like give me your opinion, give me your opinion. They could barely speak and we're asking for their opinion, and they were It was like equal relationships. It was all negotiation. And then we wonder, you know, why, why why would we expect them to suddenly be different adults. And it's kind of like you know, boomers and exers, and I know I've fallen victims of that until I really understood the data is that this is correct. Like they come into this world of work and there's this implicit expectation of them, but they don't know what that is. And yet why wouldn't we in that generation, if we have expectations, why wouldn't we coach them on that. Why wouldn't we say we expect difference. This is one of the things. This is how you manage up. This is how you manage conflict if you want to move up. These are the ways that you communicate with your team. This is these are my preferences. You know, this is a product. Yes I'm a product of my generation, but and I'm willing to compromise. But this is how I want to be communicated to. I mean, there's ways for us to be

27:42 able to just you know, openly share what our communication needs are. But instead, you know, all you just hear is complaining and grumbling like, oh, gen zs they're so lazy and entitled and they just always have an opinion. And you know, I'm the CEO. Why are they interrupting me in a town hall to share their opinion because they've done that their entire life up until now. Yeah, so we need to get better realizing this is the product of the way we raised, you know, this generation. It's also recognizing that they do have a lot of really cool, interesting things to say, and that they believe that work life bounce, well being, happiness is not antithetical to work ethic. They believe you can have the you know, it's dialectical theory that you can have both and two things can be true at the same time. I can have a well being, I can have a family, I can have friends if that's what I want to do, I can commit to those things, and I can be highly driven and ambitious and productive at work. And so they're teaching us that maybe we need to have a new rethink of what that looks like.

28:51 So interesting, and I almost feel like some of the older generation it's almost a bit it's not just set in their ways, it's almost a bit resentful. Had to do it, you know, it's like that's what I didn't get to do that or be that, So why should you. You know, there is a lot of that. Unfortunately, there's this is a big part of why I think we're trying to jam the toothbased back in the tube. When you look at the demographic makeup of the Fortune one thousand, for example, and there are a lot of the ones that are going to set precedent for mid market companies or just any organization. We all look up to that group. They're the ones in the media all the time. But the demographic makeup, you know, it's ninety three percent white male, fifty eight to sixty five. They have had a certain way of leading. This is uncomfortable. Yeah, it's scary. They don't they haven't they think about the neural wiring of the brain of a professional that's done that thing, and it's worked for a very long time. Just to rewire that now at this state in their career feels very difficult, very challenging. So I have an empathy for that, and yet it's creating a very unhappy group. And then you hear, you know, like Andy Jassey from CEO just said, we're gonna have a smaller workforce. AI is going to make a smaller workforce, and so that has been creating so much anxiety in our young people. They have this fear

30:22 of being obsolete. It's creating hopelessness because they don't see that they have a future in the workforce. They are going to university four years and they're finding that after four years, fifty percent of the careers that you study for are now obsolete. So we need to talk differently about what the future of work looks like. The happier version of work is that we're partnering with technology, that we're not being replaced by them, and that really in consideration of what would happen if no one was working, how would our society prevail? I mean, how would we be capitalists anymore? If no one could consume goods exactly.

31:11 So this idea of a desire, even a desire to replace humans with technology, it doesn't meet the model of how we consume goods, our gdp our economic situations. So unless governments around the world are going to completely change that, we still need human beings in the workforce. It is just expert like, the the rate of changing growth is just it's unprecedented. It really, I mean, there's not a better word for it. It is really unprecedented. And so you're right that there are good reasons for people to feel anxious and uncertain and getting back to we're a whole person. We're not comfortable with uncertainty. We have these basic needs that we need to have met.

31:58 I just want to go back to what you said right at the beginning, because a lot of this has been about the way organizations set things up with their focus, which is predominantly on profit and are resistant to the idea that you can have both. You can actually folk, you can actually have happy people and have profit. In fact, having a happier, more satisfied workforce leads to higher levels of profit. Is this that is accurate? This is accurate. You can see that in the Oxford Well Being Research, a new book by Jan Emmanuel Denev and George Ward. They talk about not just the correlation to happiness and well being and business outcomes, they talk about the causal relationship.

32:47 And you know, researchers and academics do not use that word lately, like they're constantly kind of creating words that parson around that because they are peer reviewed and so it's important to see that are saying there's direct links. We measured it. You can see it, you can see it in you know in sales revenue. You can see it in competitiveness. Raj Sosodia wrote Firms of Endearment and it's about conscious capitalism. He shows that there's a fifteen hundred percent increase in those organizations that focus on this well being and mental health and saving the planet and like really good goals that feel like value based goals.

33:31 They outperform the S and P five hundred by fifteen hundred percent. I mean, it's significant, but we don't I don't understand. This is something for me that I haven't quite figured out yet why this hasn't changed. And I think I get different opinions. But one of the things is that it's a lot of organizational leadership at the C level do not know how to measure it really well and measure it quickly to be able to then respond quarterly to shareholders, to people that matter. It's like, now we have this urgency of reporting all the time, and it's such a big part of the way that we that we evolve that now we can't take long term strategies and really look at how we measure them over time. There's some organizations doing it really well, like Hilton is a really great example Laura Fuentes, who is the chro. She knew that they wanted to invest in Thriving.

34:33 She spent five years just looking at the hygiene, fixing the hygiene. And to take five years and be trusted with that. I mean they're a huge company. I mean they're beholden to shareholders, and yet she said, you just have to trust me. And she was working on this through before the pandemic, and how they handled a crisis compared to other competitors was phenomenal and that was because of that work. And so then after now this thrive is truly remarkable and they are just constantly rated in all of the lists of best companies to work for and their employees love them, and and that is because she believed in the long term strategy.

35:17 And the bottom line hasn't stuffered it. They've exactly, they've only exponentially grown. I mean, they have such a strong connection to their employees, but they also have a huge fan base, and a lot of that also has to do with the fact that they've brought in their employees, which are you know, one hundreds of thousand employees, but they've brought their families in and they have this this high you know, net promoter score because people recommend you working there, but also family members are like they become loyal fans of the company and the brand, and so you have to have a long term vision because the outcome down the line is exponential, you know, business outcomes that you can never imagine. But it really is about believing that the leader can take you there and giving them the runway to do it.

36:08 A lot of this really relies on it sounds like it's a bit of an uphill battle getting leadership to recognize this, to appreciate this, and to be willing to invest in these strategies, these happiness strategies. For somebody who is working in an organization who is not happy, who doesn't feel like they're trust it doesn't feel like they have a sense of purpose, but they're not appreciated. What can they do though? But back to the choose happiness thing, but like, really, what are people's options if they're not happy at work? Because somebody listening to this podcast is going to go, well, that's all well and good, but they're not up the line. They're not doing anything about this, So what can I personally do? So this is a really good question, because I do look at it in a quadrant. You know, you have policies and good policies that help create a society and a workplace that's happier. Break to connect laws and pay transparents for in those kinds of things, so that helps.

37:04 And then yes, executive leadership they play a very big role in just giving permission. But like, look at the manager they have around. You know, the variance of someone's engagement is around seventy percent in the manager's control. So whether we're happy or sad, managers have seventy percent of that variability, that variance, So they play a huge role. So even if you have all this stuff going on, you know at the executive level, and it's not perfect or policies aren't perfect, you as a manager can still you know, engage your team of three or five and you do that by making small adjustments. I mean, we're all tired of meetings. Ask people how they're feeling, what's burning them out? They say meetings. Cut down meetings by twenty percent. Measure job satisfaction before a quarter or later, do a measure if it's improved, keep doing it. Like, there's a lot that managers can do that are free and easy, they can pilot that, they can gather data so then they can advocate and get other you know, managers to be involved. So there's a lot of control at that level. And then as an individual, we're in that quadrant you know, manager here, we're here. We still have to go to work without learned helplessness. I mean, we can't just go to our manager and say like, I'm stressed, I'm burned out. We need to spend a couple of weeks really going through that self awareness of what is causing my burnout? Is it workload? Is it that I feel like I'm overlooked for promotions all the time?

38:32 Is it lack of fairness? There's a decision or an arbitrary decision that was made, like going back to the office, and I do not want to do that. That has made me feel like I have no autonomy or agency. You know, what are those things? So understand what those you know, issues are, address them, and then also spend a couple of weeks going through the things that are like the pebbles, because the pebbles turn to boulders, that's what actually creates a lot of stress. So is it you know, you add a new technology come in and you don't really know how to use it very well, but you don't want to put up your hand to say it's creating thirty percent more work for me every day. A lot of stress comes from inefficiencies and overprocess. Maybe it's a lack of resource, Maybe it's a toxic co worker, you know, maybe it's like you're feeling micromanaged by your boss.

39:18 There's lots of things that it could be contributing to that stress and burnout. Spend some time coming up with some solutions, you know, like, don't just go to your manager or then go around them and go to HR. Spend some time and actually think about what kind of solutions can I bring to my manager. And if they're open to it, and they're a good boss, they're just so busy themselves, they're not paying attention to you as much as they should, they'll help you succeed. If it's a bad boss who doesn't want to help you, you know, that's probably going to be a constant. And so these are the things where it's like we just still need to choose happiness by owning, you know, what is in the locus of our control. What can we own, what do we know? How can we really investigate the things that are bothering us? And then once we slowly go through the process of solving them, we get more time back.

40:10 Then we can infess more in self care. Then we can participate in a program that's you know, we're really aligned with another ERG or volunteer, and so it's an incremental journey. But we have to start with ourselves to come to our you know, to our leaders with really good ideas and really creative solutions, and they'll, hopefully, if they're good leaders, they'll respond positively. So important, and just what you said about having taking back some sense of agency, I mean, just just having a sense of agency is so important for people's mental health. You're right, I think that's even just doing that exercise makes you feel like, oh I can see this. Oh no, that's that isn't my you know, my fault, Like okay, I didn't get the proper training. There no wonder this is happening. Or yeah, this person is constantly calling me last minute to solve problems for them, and I have a million other things and I don't want to say no.

41:10 My boss probably doesn't know that this other person over there that shouldn't be asking me to help them. They probably don't even know that, but I'm saying yes because I feel pressure. These are the kind of things that make you exhausted. And if you are able to think, okay, maybe I can as a team with my leader or with a co worker, we can solve these problems together, you start to feel this sense of hopefulness. Hope is really about goal setting and achieving goals, right, So it's tiny goals. So it's like solving tiny problems all the time, which builds up that cognitive hope, which builds up our self efficacy and our happiness.

41:51 You know what occurred to me as you were talking, when you were going through all of the things that might cause you burn out, and I know you said this in the book as well, is that when people list the things that cause them to be unhappy at work, such a huge percentage of them to do with people. It's relationships and how we interact with each other in the workplace has a massive impact on how satisfied we are. Yes in the first or the first book and then an on the burnout epidemic, I did some research on toxic relationships at work and there's been several studies that have found that it actually decreases your lifespan when you have a toxic relationship at work because we spend so much time there. And I thought like they were talking about losing like three years off your life if you have poor relationships at work. And because it isn't just okay you have a friend that you get mad at and maybe you don't spend time with. If you have someone that's a bully in your life or is really unkind and you have to show up and spend eight ten hours every single day around that person, it's pretty catastrophic.

42:58 So that's you know, on the side, there's real impact, but having close friendships is unbelievably special. There was this really cool Cornell study that I love. It found that twenty minutes of having lunch with someone you like once a week, just away from your desk, twenty minutes once a week, had this huge impact on your well being, on your morale, You made less mistakes, you had higher team cohesion, safety risks went down when they measured this with firefighters in different houses. I mean, it was incredible to think that, you know, just twenty minutes of having that share bomb can be the thing that makes you love your job.

43:38 So I love that so action double and so meaningful, just to highlight to people how important that is those positive social connections. Yeah, and there's this other great study that I love. It's about spreading positive gossip, so you talk really nicely behind people's backs. And they did this research and found that in these organizations where they practiced positive gossip that onboarding was exponentially increased in the time people felt comfortable in their roles. And a big reason for that was this this great increase in innovation and psychological psychological safety was people believed, which you know, perception is reality. People perceived that people were saying nice things about them behind their bag. So maybe that wasn't happening, but they thought that, and so it made them feel so confident, so optimistic, and so well cared for. And it's another thing like how easy it is for us to say nice things behind each other's bags. I mean, it's so lovely.

44:44 I love that we should all do that. We should all just just in life generally say nice things about. And then there's another thing which I love is you know how to give an optimize compliment for well being for happiness, and we often at work we were told to give kudos or you give a you know, a good job or emoji it's like great, great job. And what they're finding is people think that's okay, but it starts to lose its value over time. And so what we need to be doing is empathetic listening and then compassion, which is you know, compassion is empathy and listening, but then turning it into action. So instead, in your next meeting where you hear something really cool or delightful, you'll say, you know, hey, Cas, that was this is me talking to you. Well, we're ten, we're role playing here, go on here, yes, yes, So Cas, I love what you told the group about this project that you're working on, and that data is actually really fascinating. I'm going to bring that back to my team and we're going to like play around with that, and then I'm going to tell you how it worked out, because I just thought it's going to be very useful for me. That took fifteen twenty seconds. But you're telling someone I listen to you.

45:58 I think what you have to say is interesting, that you're passionate about this, and so now I care about that thing you're passionate about. Now, I'm going to go and mobilize that. And I'm also going to increase your profile because I'm going to be bragging about what great stuff you're doing. I mean, these are things that we don't realize, like that's so impactful to someone in their career, and it's fifteen seconds longer than kudos or great job. I love that the tactics are so simple. We tend to try to make them more complex than they are. But happiness is really about the simplicity. The point that you raise straight up in the new book, the ten year anniversary edition of the book is that fundamentally it boils down to kindness.

46:46 Yes one. And I'm citing research out of Oxford again. Oxford well Being Institute looked at the well being programs that failed and the ones that were neutral, and then the ones that were the most successful, and they found that resiliency training actually is detrimental to people's wellbeing. Interesting, very interesting. I thought that was especially for salary professionals and even worse for women. And so one of the reasons why is that it feels tone deaf. People are feeling like I'm working seventy hours. I'm taking this two hour resiliency training to be resilient from what you making me work seventy hours exactly. And because there's so much unpaid labor for women and they have that second shift, it's forcing them to take time away from family, and it just it feels very unsettling that they're investing this time in something that is being caused by the people that are training them. So that's a thing, but a lot of the other stuff is neutral. There's a lot of conversation around unconscious bias training and how that's really causing a lot of dissonance and disco Actually it's not working to bring people together. Really, they're finding that it makes people feel shamed, and so it's a bit of why fragility. There is a level of that, But I think that what happens when we do that is just we just continue to other. A better way to do

48:17 it is to amplify great people with great ideas. And a lot of great people with great ideas are from diverse backgrounds, So it's about amplification and augmentation versus deficit. And so you know, starting to think about doing more as a leader and focusing on amplifying great ideas, and it's important for us to look for the ideas and make sure we're amplifying the ideas of all audiences. And then it becomes not like, you know, the female Entrepreneur of the Year award, it's the Entrepreneur of the Year award, and you're you know, a black single mom. You know, like that is the most burned out demographic because they feel very unseen and they don't also have the privilege of just quitting something's going wrong. They fight so hard to be able to have status. That's what we should be doing is taking ideas from those groups and amplifying them.

49:11 But one of the things that is back to this in a roundabout way is altruism is the best well being investment that you can make. And it is sort of a cultural thing. It sounds sort of nebulous, like how do we build altruism? But in organizations where you're just really putting other people first and you're thinking about how they might feel in situations, you're also kind of doing for your coworkers and your peers, you're kind of doing those extra things to help them. You're asking like, what can I do to make you this problem go away, or what can we do for each other to make next week a bit easier? You know, these are the kind of things that I say, build into a weekly meeting.

49:53 Ask people what lights them up, ask people what stresses them out, and then altogether you go, what can we do to make next week? It's the kind of idea of buying the person behind you a coffee, you know, those kinds of attitudes of just like, I want to do a nice thing for someone today, and I'm going to do that by helping level you up in your career, mentoring, peer support, asking someone to teach you things, so you're asking for their knowledge, you're complimenting them in a way that's really you know again amplified. And so these are the things when you have an altruistic culture that really leads to higher well being and happiness. How interesting, And I'm assuming because the research generally about kindness is that the person the well being is improved, not just for the recipient of the contact, but the person doing the contact, like their well being improves as well.

50:44 So I imagine that's no different in an organization that everybody's benefiting. It's so true, and you know, you know, you know, social contagions and network effect. I mean, I love still the Christakis Fowler, you know, Yale Harvard study of social contagions, and and what I think is so cool about their research is that if there's people around you proximal that are happy and feeling good and optimistic, it spreads and so you're doing a nice thing, it makes you feel good, kind of like that Friend's episode where Phoebe's trying to like not be selfish as she's being selfless, and she realizes she can't because it just feels so good to do nice things. But it is that that becomes a contagion.

51:26 Then you have a network effect of people then doing nicer things for each other they know it feels good. It's all this pro social kind of give and take, and then the culture starts to slowly shift and you feel it and that becomes the norm, and you're creating these social norms that are pushing kind of maladaptive behaviors away and really increasing that pro sociality. And they've found that in a crisis, if you have a pro social organization, what tends to happen, especially in a pandemic where it's mortality facing. The research fine mean that mortality science or crisis actually completely explodes those behaviors that you currently have.

52:09 It's this idea of post traumatic growth. So if you create that culture and you hit a crisis, it actually makes you better. Wow. And if you have the opposite, it doubles down on that. So it makes you so much more polarized, so much more critical and cynical, and engagement plummets. So we want to actually build this kind of happiness up so that if we face a crisis, which I feel like we're probably going to face another crisis, and that they're happening much more frequently, that this is a really good strategy to have to be able to weather these storms so so much better. I'm not just like weather them, it's like come out deriving from them.

52:53 This has been so interesting, Jen, I really appreciate you making the time. Thank you so much for being here. I loved this conversation, and thank you so much for bringing me into your studio. This just has mean it's so much more fun. Thank you, No, you're welcome. Crappy to Happy is created and produced by me castun. If you enjoy the show, please hit the follow button wherever you listen to ensure you never miss an episode. Share with a friend to get me into the. Ease of more lovely listeners, and I would love for you to leave a five star rating and review. Thank you so much for being here and I cannot wait to catch you next week for another fabulous episode of Crappy to Happy